The name of the party is Party You Have Been to Six
Hundred Times Already. Everybody is here . . . Belinda is
with an actual woman . . . whose name is HiHowareyou
Goodtoseeyou."

This is the life of the Jay McInerney protagonist:
detached, alienated and still quite funny. We see these
characters again and again in "How It Ended," a
collection of 26 short stories, written over the course of
McInerney's 26-year career. Five of the stories are the
seeds of his novels, including "It's Six A.M. Do
You Know Where You Are?," which developed into
"Bright Lights, Big City," and "Smoke"
for "Brightness Falls" and "The Good
Life."

McInerney, 55, makes it hard to appreciate his talent. His
stories are so immediately enveloping and powerful that we
don't notice how few words he uses to conjure his rich,
complicated characters. Only in "Philomena," the
basis for his novel "Model Behavior," does he
break up his narrative into an acerbic PowerPoint
presentation of a breakup. This is jarring and forces the
reader to re-engage with the story every few paragraphs.

All of the stories deal with what McInerney calls his
"preoccupations and obsessions:" class, addiction,
fracturing families and yuppie life in and around New York.

These are all so strongly present that the characters
become less distinct from story to story. Reading them
back-to-back is like watching a season of a TV show straight
through: After each episode, the characters forget their
problems, reset and become entangled in new ones.

Alison Poole, his 1988 character from "Story of My Life," gets another turn in one of the highlights of the collection, "Penelope on the Pond," a story about an affair with a political candidate modeled after Barack Obama. In the preface, McInerney notes that he has used the Alison Poole character in a number of stories, and that Bret Easton Ellis borrowed her in a few of his own, including "American Psycho."...

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